Politics & Government
Social Protest Professor Talks 'Societal Change' Following George Floyd's Death
"It's one of the most beautiful expressions of ally-ship I can think of," a social protest expert at Northern Illinois University said.
By Kevin Bessler
As protests continue around the country following the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minnesota, comparisons are being made with civil rights protests in the 1960s.
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Simon Weffer is a sociology professor at Northern Illinois University and an expert on social protest. He said black activists today are using a new strategy by allowing white women and men to act as a buffer between them and police.
“It’s really one of the most beautiful expressions of ally-ship that I can think of because these white women and white men are standing in a line, opposite the police, insulating their African American allies,” Weffer said. “That is not something we would have seen in the 60s.”
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Weffer said the civil rights movement in the 1960s needed events to go the right way to gain momentum.
“It wasn’t until after there was a series of successes by the African American civil rights groups, like the garbage strike, to get white allies, especially from the north and Midwest, to really support the movement that was happening in the south,” Weffer said.
About 1,300 black sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike in February 1968 to protest conditions after two others were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. Martin Luther King Jr. and other national civil rights leaders soon joined in protest.
Weffer agrees with comparisons made between Floyd’s death and the Mississippi lynching of Emmett Till of Chicago.
“The killing of Emmett Till and showing his bloated, beaten face had a deep physiological impact on African Americans and was one of the precipitating events to spur more protests and mobilization in the civil rights movement,” Weffer said.
Weffer thinks Floyd death in the end may result in societal changes.
“Very much so. I think part of it is the incredible graphic nature of that nine minutes of video that we saw from Minneapolis,” he said. “You can’t help but have your heart ache when you hear a grown man call for his mother.”
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